Accuser gave conflicting account of assault: Cosby legal team

SANTA MONICA (California) • Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby's defence team introduced a former reporter from The National Enquirer tabloid at his sexual assault trial in California last Friday, arguing that the reporter's depiction of Ms Judy Huth's encounter with Cosby at the Playboy Mansion starkly contradicted Ms Huth's own account from the stand.

Ms Huth, 64, testified at the trial that Cosby, now 84, took her hand and forced her to perform a sex act on him during a visit to the mansion in 1975, when she was 16.

But the reporter, Ms Robin Mizrahi, in a personal essay published in 2018, said Ms Huth, identified by a pseudonym in the essay, had said in a 2005 interview that she was too scared to touch Cosby and had only watched as he performed a sex act on himself.

Cosby's team put forward the discrepancy as it tried to discredit Ms Huth's account, arguing that she has been inconsistent and too unreliable in her testimony to warrant being awarded damages in the lawsuit she has filed against him.

"This was based on what Judy told you," Ms Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Cosby, said to Ms Mizrahi. "Judy told you she just watched."

But Ms Mizrahi, a witness for the defence, said she could not vouch for her essay's accuracy, saying she had tried to reconstruct the 2005 interview to the best of her recollection, not from any contemporaneous notes of their conversation.

She said quotation marks she had added to remarks attributed to Ms Huth, identified as Debra in the passage, were included "for readability purposes".

The essay said the encounter had happened in the 1980s, and Ms Mizrahi conceded there were errors.

"I obviously didn't have all the facts right," she said. "I didn't feel it was the point of the story."

During her time on the stand last week, Ms Huth had been asked to discuss the same quote that suggested she had described her encounter with Cosby differently in 2005.

Ms Huth denied the accuracy of Ms Mizrahi's essay.

Ms Mizrahi said she wrote the 2018 essay after she left the Enquirer because she wanted to draw attention to Cosby's celebrity power. The earlier article that Ms Mizrahi was working on in 2005, for which Ms Huth was interviewed, was never published.

Ms Mizrahi said the Enquirer cancelled the article after Cosby agreed to a full interview with the publication.

The arguments over the quotation came as Cosby's legal team introduced what are expected to be the final witnesses in the case, which is expected to go to the jury for deliberations this week.

The 12-person panel, sitting in a courthouse in Santa Monica, California, will be asked to provide its verdict based on a preponderance of the evidence.

Only nine of the 12 will have to agree on a finding to reach a verdict, unlike the unanimity required in a criminal case.

Meanwhile, disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein will go on trial in October in Los Angeles over alleged assaults on five women, a judge ruled last Friday.

NYTIMES, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE